The reason, as we all know, why readers yearn to “believe” cosmologies and tidy systems of thought is that we live in dreadful and marvelous times where the certainties of yesterday dissolve as we live. But I don’t want to be judged as adding to a confusion of embattled certainties.

Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it? We “make things up.” This is our trade.

I remember, before I myself attempted this genre of space fiction, reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their system to ours, to ask if our sun behaving cruelly to us, as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself: at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.

It has been said that everything man is capable of imagining has its counterpart somewhere else, in a different level of reality. All our literatures, the sacred books, myths, legends—the records of the human race—tell of great struggles between good and evil. This struggle is reflected down to the level of the detective story, the Western, the romantic novel. It would be hard to find a tale or a song or a play that does not reflect this battle.

But, what battle? Where? When? Between what Forces?

No, no, I do not that there is a planet called Shammat full of low-grade space pirates, and that it sucks substance from this poor planet of ours; nor that we are the scene of conflicts between those great empires Canopus and Sirius.

But could it not be an indication of something or other that Canopus and Sirius have played such a part in ancient cosmologies?

What do our ideas of “good” and “bad” reflect?

I would not be at all surprised to find out that this earth had